Edinburgh council website offline as operators race to patch critical vulnerability
Websites have been encouraged to update their systems following yesterday’s massive outage
The City of Edinburgh Council’s website is currently offline after AI discovered a security flaw in a programming language underpinning much of the internet.
A council spokesperson said the website was down for “essential maintenance” however they did not confirm whether it was connected to the recently discovered vulnerabilities.
They added: “We are currently waiting on an update from our provider and hope to have the website up and running as soon as possible.”
It is unclear how long the outage will last, leaving residents without access to council services and online payments.
Two critical vulnerabilities with the PHP programming language which powers websites across the web were discovered by AI models.
Website operators are now racing to patch these flaws after agencies like the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre urged them to take urgent action to mitigate the issue.
The agency instructed operators to identify systems running PHP and update them to the latest version.
It added that the vulnerability with the software, which creates webpages and retrieves database information before sending the finished page to your browser, could be exploited by attackers.
Early attacks are already being spotted according to web security firm Cloudflare’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht.
In PHP’s advisory notice announcing the fixes, the programmers behind the open-source programming language said: “There are no complete mitigations, updating is the only safe choice.”
The council’s website is among a number of sites currently down for maintenance, including government agencies across Europe.
This is a developing story, we will share more updates as we get them.